18 Bizarre Phobias People Actually Have

Fear of School

And now those people suffering from verbophobia, arithmophobia, and sophophobia are just being lazy, deciding to use the all-encompassing scolionophobia, which is the fear of school. We get it, guys, you don’t want to do any homework.

11.

Fear of Bald People

Some bald people can be scary, but that’s usually primarily if their name is something like Lex Luthor or Heisenberg, who we really hope helped foster the fear of bald people – better known in scientific communities as peladophobia.

12.

Fear of Being Infested with Worms

When you talk about an absurdly specific premise for a fear that would almost certainly never, ever, ever happen in a billion years, you can’t get much better than the fear of being infested with worms – also known as helminthophobia.

13.

Fear of Long Words

The fact that the fear of long words is actually called hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia makes us think that the people who gave it that name are either sadistic or pranksters, but more than likely, they’re both.

14.

Fear of Objects on your Left

Seriously, at some point you have to start thinking that people are just messing with you when they tell you about these fears, but believe it or not levophobia is the fear of anything placed to the left hand side of a person’s body.

15.

Ithyphallophobia

We decided to go with the scientific term here just for the surprise, because this one is just hilarious and a little on the perverse side – because ithyphallophobia is the fear of seeing an erect penis. We couldn’t really illustrate this one with a picture, of course, so here’s a screaming woman instead.

16.

Fear of Antique Furniture

A highly unusual fear, this one has actually gotten some attention in the past because no less than Billy Bob Thornton famously suffers from this crippling fear, which we take to mean he’s probably not a big fan of the Antiques Road Show.

17.

Fear of Hair

Well, since we already talked about people being afraid of bald guys, it’s only fair that we also include trichopathophobia, which is the intense fear of hair, though in this case it’s generally specifically a fear of getting some sort of hair disease.

18.

Fear of the Color Yellow

Yellow has always seemed like a pretty benign color to us, but believe it or not there are people out there who find it absolutely terrifying. We have to imagine the most famous sufferer of xanthophobia has to be Green Lantern, right?